Radeon HD 4550 512MB vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which comes with core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M280X should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 75200 (588%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be a lot (more or less 950%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45600 (950%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be a lot (about 500%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (500%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.